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Chapter 3. Kansas and Missouri: Early Head Start

Introduction

Can the employment and economic self-sufficiency of hard-to-employ parents be improved while enhancing the development of their young children? To address this pressing question, the Hard-to-Employ project includes an evaluation of a two-generational program that addresses the needs both of low-income parents who are at risk of unemployment and their young children.

This chapter provides a brief review of the background literature that highlights the considerable developmental risks faced by very young children living in poverty and the promise of two-generational programs in addressing the unique needs of hard-to-employ parents who have young children. The Hard-to-Employ project is evaluating the effectiveness of enhanced employment and economic self-sufficiency services in traditional Early Head Start (EHS) programs, which are aimed at improving parents’ employment and their educational and economic outcomes. A detailed description follows of the random assignment research design of this evaluation, the key characteristics of the study sample, and programmatic enhancements to increase the focus of EHS on parental employment and economic self-sufficiency. Findings from the early assessment are also discussed. The results highlight obstacles that can be difficult to overcome when implementing such enhancements, particularly for programs that are traditionally defined as early childhood interventions. At the same time, the results illustrate important opportunities to expand the scope of child-focused and two-generational interventions to address parents’ employment and educational needs. They also call attention to the need for more evaluation research in this area.

Background and Policy Relevance

The needs of children living in poverty are a major social policy concern. Many studies indicate that poor children have worse health, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes than their more affluent counterparts.1 The rate of child poverty in the United States remains high: About 20 percent of children under 5 lived in poverty in 2003.2 Of the 35.9 million people living in poverty in the United States in 2003, about 13 million (about 36 percent) were under 18, and 4 million were under 5.3

Evidence from Research on Two-Generational Services

Earlier research demonstrates the value of two-generational services in meeting the developmental needs of low-income children.4 The Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project found that EHS improved both parenting behaviors and children’s cognitive development.5 This evaluation also identified a combination of home-based and child care-related services as one of the most effective strategies for enhancing young children’s cognitive and social outcomes. Similarly, a review of early childhood programs highlights the benefits to child development of two-generational approaches. This review suggests that home-based interventions might improve family factors, such as parenting and child maltreatment, while center-based interventions might improve children’s behavioral and cognitive development.6 Taken together, these findings suggest that combining home- and center-based services might be a powerful approach to affecting the broadest range of outcomes.

Although the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project found positive effects for children, the findings also showed quite small impacts on parents’ employment.7 Thus, the approach’s effect might be enhanced by a more proactive programmatic focus on parental employment and economic self-sufficiency.

Evidence from Welfare-to-Work Research

Experimental evaluations of welfare-to-work programs have shown mixed effects on children’s development, leading to the conclusion that these programs alone, at least in the short run, neither consistently help nor harm children. The findings also indicate only small improvements in parental mental health, parenting, and home environments, suggesting that, even when their parents enter the workforce, children continue to face considerable developmental risks.8

Implications

A two-generational approach, particularly if the program focuses on parents’ employment and economic self-sufficiency, can have wider-ranging effects than a program focused solely on either parents or children.9 Directly addressing young children’s developmental needs can help parents overcome obstacles to sustained employment and economic self-sufficiency. Likewise, directly addressing parents’ employment and economic needs can improve their ability to better their own financial circumstances and can indirectly benefit children.

Program Description

EHS, a two-generational program that serves pregnant women and families with children under 3, emerged as an early candidate for the Hard-to-Employ evaluation for a two reasons. First, EHS focuses on promoting children’s school readiness and developmental outcomes by providing a range of intensive child and family development services through home visits and center-based child care. A strong emphasis is placed on enhancing young children’s physical, behavioral, language, and cognitive development, promoting positive parent-child relationships, addressing parents’ social service needs, and promoting healthy prenatal outcomes for pregnant women. Second, the program targets and places a priority on high-needs and low-income families, many of whom experience multiple barriers to employment and financial self-sufficiency.

These goals of EHS are achieved through a variety of program options, including (1) center-based services, in which all services are provided to families through center-based child care services; (2) home-based services, in which all services are provided to families through weekly home visits, and the program is responsible for ensuring that families who need child care find care in the community that meets the revised Head Start Program Performance Standards; and (3) mixed-approach services, in which families receive a combination of home-based and center-based services or cycle from one service option to the other, but do not receive both types of services at the same time.

To qualify for EHS services, pregnant women and families with infants or toddlers must reside within the boundaries of an EHS program’s designated service area; families must meet EHS income eligibility requirements by having a family income that is at or below the federal poverty threshold;10 and children must be under 3 to meet EHS age guidelines, though children can remain in the program until they transition to Head Start at age 4. Families who are interested in receiving EHS services complete an application and are assigned a priority score based on their specific needs, barriers to employment, or circumstances. Priority is given to pregnant women and families who have infants or toddlers and have particular characteristics related to their employment, welfare receipt, child disability, or teenage parental status.

Reconnaissance and site selection efforts identified two very strong EHS programs in Kansas and Missouri that were interested in enhancing their existing services aimed at improving parental employment and self-sufficiency.11 These sites were selected based on their established histories of delivering high-quality EHS services; the use of a mixed-approach services model (a combination of services that the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project points to as being most effective for enhancing young children’s developmental outcomes);12 their capacities to build sufficient waiting lists to sustain and justify random assignment; and support by the EHS policy councils for a random assignment study and programmatic enhancements to existing EHS services.

Southeast Kansas Community Action Program, Inc. (SEK-CAP) Early Head Start (Girard, Kansas)

SEK-CAP is a community-based agency that serves low-income families and children in 12 rural counties of southeast Kansas. It receives funding from a mix of federal and state grants to provide family outreach, transportation, housing, and early childhood educational services. The EHS program is able to serve up to 50 families located in four rural counties, including Cherokee, Crawford, Labette, and Montgomery counties.13 All participating families receive a mix of home- and center-based services; families who do not receive EHS child care services receive weekly home visits by family educators and attend biweekly group socialization sessions, where parents and children interact with other EHS families; other families receive full-day, full-year EHS child care services and biweekly home visits from family educators.

Youth-In-Need, Inc., Early Head Start (St. Charles, Missouri)

Youth-In-Need is a multiservice agency that serves low-income families and children in eastern Missouri. In addition to operating EHS and Head Start programs, the agency provides residential treatment programs, outreach services for homeless individuals and families, after-school leadership and educational programs for youth, and individual and group mental health services. The EHS program, which is supported exclusively by federal grants, is currently funded to serve 199 families in four suburban and rural counties surrounding St. Louis, Missouri.

Youth-In-Need provides both home-based and center-based services. Families can move seamlessly from one service option to another but generally do not receive both service options at once. Families exclusively enrolled in EHS child care services receive parental support and child development services through daily interactions with EHS teachers and center-based managers at EHS child care centers. Families who do not receive EHS child care services receive weekly home visits by family educators and attend at least two group socialization sessions per month, where parents and children interact with other EHS families. However, families who receive child care through collaborative partnerships at other community-based child care centers also receive home-based services in the form of quarterly visits from a home visitor.

Programmatic Enhancements to Early Head Start Employment and Self-Sufficiency Services

MDRC has worked closely with the EHS programs at SEK-CAP and Youth-In-Need to enhance their existing services with a more explicit focus on parental employment and economic self-sufficiency, supported by additional funding from the Head Start Bureau at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The focus on parental employment and financial self-sufficiency is intended to: (1) help parents who are unemployed move into employment; (2) assist parents with low levels of education to pursue educational goals as a means of improving their employment and financial circumstances; and (3) help parents who are employed to find more stable employment, advance in their jobs, and earn higher wages. Through this collaborative effort, SEK-CAP and Youth-In-Need developed formalized employment and self-sufficiency curricula and services, including:

1. Hiring an on-site self-sufficiency specialist to work with EHS staff and families on topics related to employment and self-sufficiency and to develop community partnerships with local employment-focused and educational agencies;

2. Increasing EHS’s programmatic focus on employment and self-sufficiency issues by assisting parents to set employment- and training-related goals and regularly monitoring their progress; and

3. Tapping external employment and educational agencies and organizations to fill the gaps in existing EHS employment and self-sufficiency services.

Research Design, Sample Intake Process, and Random Assignment

This evaluation uses a random assignment research design to test the effects on parents and young children of the package of EHS services, including programmatic enhancements to employment and self-sufficiency services. See Figure 3.1 for an illustration of the random assignment procedure.

Families interested in receiving EHS services complete an application. For the purposes of the evaluation, the study and the random assignment process are also explained to families. Families are not required to participate in the evaluation, but the only way they can receive program services is to consent to be randomly assigned. Families who agree to be randomly assigned are then placed on the waiting list in priority order based on their needs and circumstances. When a program slot becomes available, paired random assignment is conducted with the top two eligible and interested families on the waiting list. Families are randomly assigned to either:

• The EHS program group. If assigned to the program group, the family will be enrolled in EHS services and will begin to receive home visits and applicable child care services.

• The non-EHS control group. If assigned to the control group, the family will not be enrolled in EHS services. However, the family will be able to receive whatever other community services exist and will receive a resource list of available services.

To ensure that the neediest families are not excluded from receiving services as a result of random assignment and that programs are able to meet revised Head Start Program Performance Standards,14 each program is given a set number of exemptions from random assignment per year (determined by the number of new enrollees) to be used for the neediest families, based on specific criteria defined by the programs before the start of the study.

Enhanced Recruitment Efforts

Though the programs generally had extensive waiting lists and did not have enough slots to enroll all applicant families before the evaluation began, they expressed a desire to reach a greater number of high-needs families in their surrounding communities. With the introduction of random assignment, two issues were also particularly important to address. First, there was the need to maintain a sufficient waiting list to ensure that two eligible families were available for random assignment when a program slot became available. Second, once random assignment began, the programs needed to serve at least as many, if not more, high-needs families, that is, those with a high priority score. To date, both programs have enhanced their recruitment efforts, have continued to serve at least as many, if not more, high-needs families than in the past, and have been successful in tapping new referral sources to maintain waiting lists that are sufficient to support random assignment.

[D]

 

Sample Build-Up

Random assignment of families to the EHS programs began in late July/early August 2004. The initial goal was to randomly assign 400 families in Youth-In-Need and 300 families in SEK-CAP over two years. However, sample build-up was slightly lower than anticipated because of difficulties estimating program intake before the study started in one site. Therefore, random assignment was extended for an additional six months in both sites to achieve the targeted sample-size goals. As of December 31, 2006, the programs had randomly assigned 610 families (305 per research group).

Baseline Data and Key Outcomes

Data for this evaluation are collected on the following key constructs.

• Baseline demographic and descriptive data. Baseline demographic information on the sample is drawn from common information across all of the programs’ intake forms and assessments, which are completed as part of the EHS application process. The assessments generally have two components: a program eligibility determination and priority score assignment and an in-depth interview with the parent covering certain aspects of family life.

• Parental employment. Data on parental employment are collected from several sources. MDRC is currently obtaining unemployment insurance (UI) quarterly data from the Kansas and Missouri State Departments of Labor. These data show quarterly employment in UI-covered jobs held in Kansas or Missouri for each sample member. Administrative data records will be supplemented by survey information on parental employment experiences collected 15 months after random assignment. MDRC intends to access wage data from the National Directory of New Hires. This is a national database maintained by the Office of Child Support Enforcement that can provide information on earnings from employment both within and outside Kansas and Missouri.

• Income, earnings, and public assistance receipt. Data from state administrative records track parents’ income, earnings, and public assistance receipt in Kansas and Missouri for each sample member. These data are maintained by the Kansas and Missouri Departments of Human Services. This information is supplemented by survey information on parental income, earnings, and public assistance receipt collected 15 months after random assignment.

• Parental psychological well-being, parenting, family functioning, and child care use. Key aspects of parental psychological well-being, parenting, and family functioning, such as activities with children (play and discipline) and family routines, as well as child care use that might account for the effects of EHS on young children’s development, will be assessed using survey information collected 15 months after random assignment.

• Children’s developmental outcomes. Children’s well-being will be measured by direct child assessments and survey data collected 15 months after random assignment. The survey will be administered to children’s primary caregivers and includes measures of children’s social/emotional, cognitive development, academic achievement, and health and safety outcomes. An interviewer also asks children (ages 2 to 4 years old) to perform several self-regulation tasks, which assess their motor control, attention skills, impulsivity, and emotional state at the time of the assessment. These tasks include walking along a line and drawing circles at varying speeds, and waiting and not peeking while the interviewer pretends to wrap a gift that will later be given to the child. For these same children, assessments of cognitive development using the broad math and reading subscales of the Woodcock-Johnson III-R will be collected. For these children, as well as those between the ages of 1 and 2, MDRC will administer a subset of the Reynell Developmental Language Scales, which assesses receptive language abilities.

• Child welfare involvement. MDRC is currently looking into the availability of data from the Kansas and Missouri child welfare administrative records that provide information about sample members’ referrals to and involvement with state child welfare systems, as well as substantiated and unsubstantiated cases of child abuse and neglect.

• Program participation data. MDRC is exploring the possibility of obtaining administrative participation records from the programs. These data provide information on each family’s participation in EHS, such as the number and frequency of home visits and attendance at parent training workshops.

Characteristics of the Sample

Table 3.1 presents selected baseline characteristics of the study sample by research group as of December 31, 2006. A total of 610 families (305 in each research group) have been randomly assigned. Characteristics for parents and children are included. As expected with a random assignment research design, there were very few differences in background characteristics between the two research groups. Nevertheless, MDRC carried out a careful review of random assignment procedures. Random assignment was conducted in accordance with the prescribed protocol, and it appears that the observed differences between the research groups were due to chance and not systematic biases. All future analyses will adjust for differences in these baseline characteristics.

Overall, the characteristics of the EHS study sample fall within an expected range of characteristics that are similar to those of the national population of families served by EHS programs. For example, the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project indicates that 10 percent of households received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), with this percentage ranging from 12 to 66 percent across the research programs included in the evaluation. The Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project also shows that 40 percent of households are two-parent families and 55 percent of primary caregivers were not employed across the research programs included in the evaluation. These estimates are similar to the current study sample characteristics.15

As shown in Table 3.1, the majority of parents who applied for EHS services in Youth-In-Need and SEK-CAP and were randomly assigned are female (90 percent), and more than half are single and never married (54 percent). Eighty-six percent of the sample are white, about 5 percent are Hispanic, and about 8 percent are black. Slightly more than half the sample (51 percent) worked more than 12 months in the past three years. About 33 percent worked 12 months or less during that period, and 15 percent had not worked in the three years before random assignment. About 29 percent of families received TANF upon random assignment and approximately 47 percent reported ever having received TANF before random assignment. A relative minority of applicants are prenatal cases (11 percent) or teen parents (12 percent). Slightly more than half the children in the sample (53 percent) are boys. Children are about 17 months old, on average, upon random assignment.

 

The Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration
Table 3.1
Selected Baseline Characteristics, by Research Group
Early Head Start

Characteristics			EHS	Non-EHS	Total
Characteristics of childa	Gender (%)	Female	47.5	46.5	47.0
		Male	52.5	53.5	53.0
	Average age (months)		17.9	16.5	17.2
Characteristics of primary parent	Gender (%)	Female	89.8	89.4	89.6
		Male	10.2	10.6	10.4
	Average age (years)		25.74	25.92	25.83
	Marital status (%)	Single, never married	54.8	53.5	54.2
		Married	26.2	31.4	28.8
		Separated/divorced/widowed	18.9	15.1	17.0
	Spanish/Hispanic/Latinoa**		3.3	7.0	5.1
	Race/ethnicityb(%)	White	87.7	84.3	86.0
		Black or African-American	7.3	9.4	8.3
		American Indian or Alaskan Native	1.0	0.3	0.7
		Asian or Pacific Islander	0.7	0.7	0.7
		Other	3.3	5.4	4.3
	Employment during the past 3 years (%)	Did not work at all	15.3	15.1	15.2
		Worked 1 year or less	29.7	36.6	33.1
		Worked more than 1 year	55.0	48.3	51.7
Characteristics of casec	Average priority score		289.68	290.47	290.08
	Prenatal status (%)		10.8	10.5	10.7
	Teen parent (%)		11.5	12.5	12.0
	Two-parent family (%)		39.0	44.9	42.0
	Currently on TANF (%)		29.2	28.9	29.1
	Ever on TANF (%)		48.2	45.1	46.6
Sample size			305	305	610

SOURCE: MDRC calculations from Early Head Start (EHS) Program Information Forms (PIF) for families randomly assigned from July 21, 2004, through December 31, 2006. NOTES: In order to assess differences in characteristics across research groups, chi-square tests were used for categorical variables, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were used for continuous variables. Levels for statistically significant differences between program and control groups are indicated as ** = 5 percent. a Prenatal cases are not included in this computation. b "Other" is self-identified by the parent and may include biracial, multiracial, or a category other than white, black, American Indian, or Asian/Pacific Islander. c Priority scores are assigned to families interested in receiving EHS services upon completing an EHS application and are constructed by summing points assigned to specific needs, barriers, or circumstances that a family faces (such as a family's child care needs), parental employment, single-parent status, having a child with a disability, and having a family income below the poverty threshold. Priority scores ranged from 65 to 765. Prenatal status indicates whether the mother is currently pregnant upon random assignment._E _C _Total Current TANF receipt indicates whether the family is currently receiving TANF upon random assignment. Ever having received TANF indicates whether the family had ever received TANF prior to random assignment.

 

Early Findings from the Assessment

In May and September 2005, MDRC assessed the two EHS programs to: (1) ensure that the programs were implementing random assignment as planned; (2) examine levels of participation in program services, particularly engagement in EHS employment and self-sufficiency services; and (3) evaluate the sites’ progress in making programmatic enhancements to their employment and self-sufficiency services.

As expected, the assessments showed that random assignment was running smoothly and that the programs had made great strides in enhancing their existing employment and self-sufficiency services. Yet there were opportunities to accelerate the implementation of these enhancements. The assessments also showed a less than universal level of participation in EHS. Some families did not enroll in the program after being randomly assigned to the program group. MDRC continues to provide technical assistance and to monitor sites’ progress in these areas.

Participation and Service Receipt

As part of the assessments, MDRC examined participation rates in EHS to determine whether the participating families are receiving services as intended. Calculations of EHS program participation and receipt of services are drawn from an MDRC review of selected EHS case files in Youth-In-Need and SEK-CAP. The sample for this analysis is limited to the 97 families that were randomly assigned when the assessments were conducted. These results are presented in Table 3.2.

About 88 percent (85 of 97) of families randomly assigned to the EHS program group actually enrolled in EHS services. That is, approximately 12 percent of families in the program group never received any EHS services. While the level of service receipt was fairly high, this has implications for the study, since all families randomly assigned to the program group, regardless of whether they were ever enrolled, will be included in the final impact analysis. The field research suggests that some of these families opted out of receiving program services when they learned that they had been accepted into the program (that is, after random assignment), because they were not fully aware of the time commitment required for the 90-minute home visits. In other cases, families moved out of the EHS service area and, consequently, were no longer eligible for services. Despite the drop-off in EHS service receipt, differences in exposure to high-quality, intense, child-focused services between program and control groups will likely be evident, given that the control group did not receive any EHS services.

Enhancements to Employment and Self-Sufficiency Services

The programs implemented a number of enhancements to existing employment and self-sufficiency services. However, circumstances such as turnover in frontline and management staff have slowed the implementation of these programmatic enhancements, suggesting that there are still opportunities to further enhance existing services.

 

The Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration
Table 3.2
Participation and Service Receipt
Early Head Start

Characteristic (%)
Enrolled in EHS program		87.6
Among those enrolled:	Completed educational and self-sufficiency assessment tool	64.7
	Completed any self-sufficiency goal	69.4
	Received any referrals to a self-sufficiency activity	24.7
	Has any entry related to self-sufficiency in the family's service event notes	71.8
Sample size		97

SOURCE: MDRC calculations from review of selected EHS case files from Youth-In-Need and SEK-CAP. NOTES: The sample for MDRC calculations is limited to the families who were randomly assigned at the time the early assessments were conducted. The sample for Youth-In-Need is limited to families randomly assigned between July 21, 2004, and April 30, 2005; the sample for SEK-CAP is limited to families randomly assigned between July 21, 2004, and March 31, 2005.

 

On-site self-sufficiency specialist

Both programs have hired employment staff to act as on-site self-sufficiency specialists to oversee and develop the programs’ employment and self-sufficiency services, as well as to fill critical gaps in knowledge about existing employment and training resources in the community. The self-sufficiency specialists act as “resource experts” to help staff identify available employment and training-related resources and work with families on issues of employment and self-sufficiency. This has allowed the programs to become knowledgeable about resources without overwhelming the frontline staff who directly work with families. For example, home visitors can now seek out the self-sufficiency specialist when they need information to help address a specific issue or when they need to access less commonly used resources or agencies.

The employment staff are also in charge of establishing partnerships and referral mechanisms with the local agencies that provide EHS families with employment and educational services, such as job search assistance and General Educational Development (GED) classes. This allows one staff person to establish community partnerships, increasing the likelihood of accountability and follow-up.

Increased programmatic focus on employment and self-sufficiency

The programs have placed an increased focus on helping parents to set and achieve employment and educational goals and regularly monitoring their progress. To give staff the skills and resources they needed to work with parents, the programs created resource guides and assessment tools and conducted staff training sessions on employment and self-sufficiency. The programs have also provided parent training sessions focused on employment and self-sufficiency. Notably, this heightened focus does not appear to have compromised the quality of child development and other family support services that families received.

• Identifying parents’ employment and educational goals and creating assessment tools. To facilitate discussions of parents’ employment and training-related goals, the programs created assessment tools and brief forms, so that staff could gather information about parents’ employment and educational backgrounds. They also established benchmarks for completing the assessment tools and identifying parental goals; front-line staff are responsible for ensuring that all families complete an educational and employment assessment tool and set at least one employment or educational goal. These are important developments, as before these EHS programs became involved in the Hard-to-Employ evaluation, they historically had no procedures for assessing parents’ employment and educational backgrounds, nor did they have a platform for discussing and monitoring parents’ progress.

• Staff training. The programs have instituted staff training to further enhance the skills and competencies of frontline staff so that they are better able to work with families on their employment and self-sufficiency goals and needs.

• Parent training. Both programs have plans to conduct or have conducted in-house training sessions for families, focused on employment and self-sufficiency.

Accessing external employment and educational resources

To better serve the needs of families, the programs have begun to identify external agencies that fill the gaps in existing EHS employment and self-sufficiency services.

• Employment and self-sufficiency resource guides. The programs created user-friendly employment and self-sufficiency resource guides, so that staff could easily refer parents to external agencies in the community when necessary, and trained frontline staff in their use. In addition, employment staff have continued to update the resource guides with newsletters and additional information on available employment and training resources.

• Partnerships with external employment and educational resources. Employment staff at both programs have begun building critical partnerships with local agencies that provide employment and training services. They have met with service providers at one-stop career centers, welfare agencies, and vocational rehabilitation services. One program has successfully forged a relationship with a one-stop career center, which has agreed to dedicate a staff person to provide job search assistance to all EHS families.

Challenges in Enhancing Employment and Self-Sufficiency Services

The assessments indicate that the programs have made important strides in enhancing their existing employment and self-sufficiency services. Yet they also highlight some unexpected obstacles to the programs’ implementation of these enhancements. Nevertheless, the findings identify opportunities to enhance services aimed at addressing parents’ employment and educational needs, even within the scope of a child-focused intervention.

Integrating the activities of employment staff into the EHS model

It is clear that employment staff play valuable roles in developing EHS employment and self-sufficiency services. Yet the assessments also indicate that employment staff were not being used to their full potential. Several frontline staff reported that they had minimal interactions with employment staff. The field research also shows that, rather than working through the frontline staff who were assigned to particular families, employment staff often contacted families directly. This system did not function well, as many frontline staff members said that they were not informed about the employment staff’s interactions with families. Moreover, this practice did not leverage the strengths of the EHS service delivery model. A more effective EHS employment and self-sufficiency service delivery model would build upon the trusting relationships between families and the staff who have the most direct contact with them.

Developing employment and training goals and using assessment tools

Even though assessment tools and targeted benchmarks were developed for employment and self-sufficiency goals, a review of EHS families’ case files indicated that fewer families than expected (65 percent, 55 of 85 families enrolled in EHS, as shown in Table 3.2), actually completed the assessment tools with frontline staff. A similar proportion of families, roughly 69 percent of families enrolled in EHS, shown in Table 3.2, identified at least one self-sufficiency goal, suggesting that the programs have not met their targeted benchmarks in this area as expected.

A review of families’ goals further suggests that many of them were broad, raising concerns about whether they were achievable. For example, one of the typical goals listed by families was to “get a job.” The field research indicates that frontline staff spent less time than expected addressing employment and self-sufficiency. They viewed the increased programmatic focus on employment and self-sufficiency as an “add-on” specifically related to the evaluation, rather than a core component of EHS services. This difficulty was compounded because the staff felt uncomfortable about discussing employment and self-sufficiency issues with families. As shown in Table 3.2, only 72 percent of enrolled families had at least one entry in their case notes related to employment or self-sufficiency. Furthermore, discussions with frontline staff indicate that some brought up parental employment and self-sufficiency goals at every home visit, whereas others discussed them less frequently. It may be difficult to detect significant program impacts on employment-related outcomes because of the variation in the dosage of EHS employment and self-sufficiency services across families.

Delays in implementing staff and parent training

Because of programmatic challenges, such as staff turnover, the programs have delayed conducting many of the planned staff and parent training sessions focused on employment and self-sufficiency. These delays likely contribute to gaps in staff’s knowledge about available community resources and their reluctance to broach the topic of employment and self-sufficiency with families.

Accessing external resources and developing community partnerships

While programs have identified new employment and training resources available in the community, the assessments indicate that, as shown in Table 3.2, few families were referred to such resources; only 25 percent of families enrolled in EHS were referred to one self-sufficiency activity at the time of the assessments. This is an area of concern, because connecting families to community-based resources is a fundamental goal of the EHS programs.

The field research indicates clear differences between urban and rural areas in frontline staff’s knowledge of employment and training resources. In rural areas, where available resources are scarce, identifying resources and developing partnerships with other agencies has been particularly difficult.

Summary of findings from early assessments

The EHS programs made important strides in enhancing their existing employment and self-sufficiency services. The assessments indicate, however, that overcoming obstacles to programmatic change can be challenging. It is apparent that shifting the focus of EHS services to include a more explicit proactive focus on parents’ employment, education, and self-sufficiency can be difficult, especially for programs that have traditionally defined themselves as early childhood interventions. Yet, despite these constraints, there is encouraging evidence of opportunities for programmatic change.

Recent Program Enhancements

Since the early assessments, the programs have made important strides in addressing many of the issues the assessments raised.

• Verifying families’ interest before random assignment to maintain high levels of participation in EHS services. Before conducting random assignment, the programs have placed an increased emphasis on verifying a family’s interest in receiving EHS services. They now systematically call families from the waiting list to confirm their interest in EHS services before random assignment. This may help to decrease the drop-off in EHS participation by ensuring that families will actually enroll in services if they are randomly assigned to the program group. The programs have also sought to maintain contact with families who have dropped out of the program in order to encourage them to reenroll in EHS services.

• Targeting families who are most likely to benefit from employment and self-sufficiency services. The programs have begun to place a priority on targeting the families who are most likely to benefit from employment and self-sufficiency services. For example, efforts have been made to target (in descending order) parents who are unemployed and/or receiving cash assistance, are not currently working full time or are underemployed, and are employed but in unstable jobs or with irregular work schedules.

• Seamless incorporation of self-sufficiency enhancements into existing EHS services. The programs have taken important steps to integrate the activities of employment staff into the EHS model. EHS employment and frontline staff have forged collaborative relationships to address families’ self-sufficiency goals. This ensures an ongoing exchange of information regarding the employment and educational resources that families receive and the steps they have taken toward their goals. In addition, to reinforce progress toward seeing these services as integral to EHS, the programs have instituted management review and monitoring systems that hold all staff accountable for helping families set and achieve their goals. In the past, there was no accountability and monitoring system to ensure that frontline staff were delivering employment and self-sufficiency services to families as intended.

• Accelerated plans for staff and parent training sessions. The programs have accelerated plans for staff and parent training on employment and self-sufficiency. Several staff training sessions focused on assessing families’ needs, completing assessment tools, and helping families to set achievable self-sufficiency goals. One program has provided key training for parents that includes on-site GED preparation twice a week and Money Smarts, a series of classes on budgeting. The programs also continue to identify opportunities for staff and parent training in the community.

Conclusions

The Hard-to-Employ evaluation is studying a two-generational program that addresses both the needs of low-income parents who are hard to employ and the developmental needs of young children. This evaluation constitutes an important test of a potentially powerful approach for generating benefits for parents’ employment and economic self-sufficiency, as well as children’s development and school readiness, and highlights the need for more evaluation research in this area.

The results of the early assessment are encouraging: They show that a child-centered program does have the capacity to significantly enhance the focus of its existing services to address families’ employment, educational, and self-sufficiency needs, while retaining a strong focus on children’s developmental needs. The programs successfully hired on-site self-sufficiency specialists who developed expertise about available employment and training-related resources in the community and helped staff work with parents on employment and self-sufficiency. The programs created innovative assessment tools, conducted staff and parent training sessions, and compiled resource guides.

The early assessment findings also provide positive evidence that community organizations do have the potential to sustain a large-scale experimental evaluation; the programs have been able to support random assignment, enhance their recruitment efforts by tapping new referral sources, and continue to reach at least as many, if not more, high-needs families. They have also maintained relatively high levels of service receipt among EHS families, suggesting that there will likely be sufficient differences in exposure to high-quality, child-focused services between the program and the control groups.

The field research also uncovered some significant obstacles to implementing employment and self-sufficiency programmatic enhancements, especially during the start-up phase. The experiences of these EHS programs offer important lessons for other child-focused programs that seek to implement similar enhancements. It is critically important to involve frontline staff and gain their commitment to delivering the enhancements. It can be challenging to ensure that frontline staff view employment and self-sufficiency as a core component of EHS services, to expand their knowledge of employment and educational resources in the community, and to increase their comfort in discussing employment and self-sufficiency with families — especially in a program that has traditionally defined itself as an early childhood intervention. The obstacles the programs faced as they started up may lead to smaller program impacts for the cohorts of families that were randomly assigned during the early phases of the study. Even so, the results from the early assessments illuminate opportunities to enhance services aimed at addressing parents’ employment and educational needs within the scope of child-focused interventions.

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1 Duncan and Brooks-Gunn (1997). (back)

2 Current Population Survey (2004). (back)

3 Current Population Survey (2004). (back)

4 Shonkoff and Phillips (2000); Olds et al. (1999). (back)

5 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2002). (back)

6 Yoshikawa (1994). (back)

7 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2002). (back)

8 Morris et al. (2001). (back)

9 Werner and Smith (1992). (back)

10 Note that in some cases, the income requirement can be waived if the child or family has special needs (as determined by the individual Early Head Start program). However, no more than 10 percent of the program’s enrolled caseload can exceed the income eligibility requirement at one time. (back)

11 Three programs in Kansas and Missouri were initially identified that met all of the selection criteria and agreed to participate in the Hard-to-Employ evaluation. Because of programmatic challenges, including difficulties sustaining a waiting list, one of these sites was excluded from the evaluation. (back)

12 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2002). (back)

13 In August 31, 2006, the EHS program received an additional grant from the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services to serve an additional 30 families, bringing the total number of families served by the EHS program to 80. (back)

14 Program performance standards require that children with special needs, such as developmental disabilities, fill at least 10 percent of program slots.  (back)

15 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2002). (back)

 

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